Volume 21, Number 21 & 22 · January 23, 1975
Huxley at Home
By Robert Craft
Aldous Huxley: A Biography
by Sybille Bedford
Knopf/Harper and Row, 769 pp., $15.00
The British reception of Mrs. Bedford's biography reveals that late 1930s' attitudes toward Aldous Huxley have scarcely changed. He is still the clever novelist gone preachy and dull, the scion of England's best-bred intellectual family run off to live on the wrong side of the cultural tracks, one of the brightest minds of the Realm defected from respectable agnosticism to bizarre religions and pseudo sciences. For one old-friend critic, Raymond Mortimer, the mere mention of Huxley's residence in Southern California is enough to explain his downfall. The new account of the life might at least have been expected to change that perspective. Yet despite Mrs. Bedford's intentions of fair-mindedness, she does not wholly succeed in escaping the same insularity.
Review, 3308 words
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